Letting It Ride – Las Vegas Part 2

It was as I was getting ready to leave to the airport and I was looking for a purse that Barb had which she keeps our stash of US dollars that I came across another purse that had nothing but Euros. It reminded me that we had been to Europe five times in the last five years but I had probably been to the States perhaps three or four times in the same period. This trip to Las Vegas would definitely be a rare occasion for me. I was traveling with a colleague from the office to the conference in Vegas and this would make the trip a bit more tolerable but in all honesty I was not looking forward to this trip at all. Under normal circumstances, I would be starting to be getting into the whole Christmas thing around now and would be planning on putting up the Christmas lights outside and arranging to get a Christmas tree for the house. All of those things were going to have to be put on hold until I get back.

We arrived in Las Vegas and took a shuttle to our airport: the Rio hotel. On the way over to our hotel on the shuttle, I was able to get my first glimpses of the famous hotels along Las Vegas Blvd. or The Strip as it is more commonly know.

One of the things that we found as soon as we got to our hotel is that lining up seems to be a fact of life everywhere you go in Las Vegas. We had to wait for about 15 minutes in a line up just to get to the registration desk before taking the long walk through the casino to the elevators to get to our rooms. Everyone who has been to Vegas has told me similar stores of having to walk long distances with their luggage in tow to get to their rooms. This seems to be common to most hotels here and we can only assume that this is to lure you into stopping along the way to drop a few dollars at a slot machine or table.

Our rooms were quite large (about 600 sq. ft.) and apparently all of the rooms in the Rio Hotel are at least this size or larger. Unfortunately our views out of our window were of the roof of the casino and a number of air conditioning units.

We were to spend the next four days in our conference and not get outside until the evenings. The weather has been around hovering around 5 degrees C at night so with a sweater on we have been able to walk around fairly comfortably. This seems to be in stark contrast to what most people have told us who have come here at other parts of the year when walking outside for more than 5 minutes was near impossible due to the stifling heat.

We went on or first tour of the city on Monday night and headed down to Fremont St. which is very much “old Las Vegas�. 30 years ago Fremont was probably the main street in Vegas but has now been tuened into a walking mall with a roof covering about 4 blocks of the street. The roof is actually quite unique as it is a real television and every hour at night they show short videos overhead on this massive screen. Although the picture quality wasn’t that great, it was really quite an impressive sight.


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Yesterday we took the hotel shuttle to The Strip and spent several hours walking through many of the large, newer hotels that are there. Caesar’s Palace, MGM Grand, Bellagio, Luxor plus countless others are the names that are front and centre along this long boulevard. We had dinner at an Italian restaurant called Ventuno which is in the Flamingo hotel. I thought to myself that this was the first Italian restaurant that I had been to since Italy. Six weeks ago when leaving Italy I never would have guessed that I would be next eating Italian in Las Vegas.

As we went from hotel to hotel along the Strip and walked through countless casinos, I was thinking that once inside of most hotels, one casino began to look pretty much like another – just an endless sea of flashing, blinking lights and tables. About the only minor variation is the theme that each hotel had and subsequently the uniforms of the staff were different. Other than that there wasn’t really that much to tell them apart. As an interesting similarity, I have often thought the same thing while walking through many of the churches and cathedrals in Europe and how many of them begin to look the same.

One of the trends that seem to be occurring in the newer hotels in Las Vegas is to copy some existing city or location and make a hotel of it. Hotels like Paris, New York New York, Luxor, Bellagio, the Venetian, etc. all share this trait. I suppose that in the endless competition between hotels and the need to distinguish one hotel from another that this would be inevitable.

It’s interesting that one of the last towns that we visited in Italy was Bellagio (on the shore of Lake Como in northern Italy) which is where from where the name of the hotel of the same name came. In the front of the Bellagio hotel there is a famous dancing fountains that we happen to see on our walk along the Strip. I can safely say that of everything that we had seen in Vegas on this trip the fountains at the Bellagio were among the most impressive.


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Baden